"Transcribe": the platform that resuscitates the diaries of ethnologists
The collaborative platform "Transcrire" allows everyone to discover notebooks of ethnologists, geographers and archaeologists © Transcrire / Montage RFI
Text by: Yaël Caux Follow
10 mins
How did the French ethnologists, geographers and archaeologists who traveled the world in the 19th and 20th centuries work?
The collaborative platform Transcrire allows them to discover it thanks to their notebooks, full of field notes, maps or lexicons.
The site also offers to participate in the transcription of these digitized notebooks, taken from expeditions in Africa, from the Nigerien Sahel to Algeria and the Horn of Africa, but also in Central Europe, Mexico and France.
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An Algerian café in the Aurès region in 1936? The mountains of Transylvania in 1921? Breton oral literature in the 19th century? The choice is yours, the journey has just begun! Finally, it is still well underway. Almost 15,000 scanned pages, over 60 notebooks and 11 projects. The
Transcrire
platform
was born from a collaboration with a dozen French research libraries and archive centers. All of them have already digitized these documents, sometimes dating back more than 150 years. Documents bequeathed by the researchers themselves or their descendants if they were deceased. But even digitized, their format and condition sometimes make them difficult to read or use. Hence the idea of transcribing them.
"
To discover a heritage that is not sufficiently highlighted
"
It is Fabrice Melka, research engineer at the CNRS, and at the Institute of African Worlds (IMAF) in Paris, who imagined this collaborative platform.
His intuition dates from 2011. He then studied the field notebooks of archaeologist Raymond Mauny, who visited West Africa a lot between 1942 and 1962. Fabrice Melka decides to open a blog on which he regularly publishes a few pages from the archaeologist.
The experience pleases him.
But to transform the essay, he relies on a collaborative project.
This is how he created the Transcrire platform in 2016: he contacted archives and libraries to collect field notebooks.
“
The goal is not just to transcribe these documents for university researchers,” he
explains.
It is above all a matter of cultural mediation, of putting audiences in touch with collections, in order to discover this heritage which is not sufficiently highlighted.
[...] With collaborative transcription, readers don't just watch and read documents.
They really engage in it!
[...] And this allows them to learn more about a region, a territory, practices.
But also to discover how these researchers worked at that time, in very different regions of the world.
"
Attract amateurs
If the site has around 400 contributor accounts, according to Fabrice Melka, only 40% of them are really active.
Often researchers, but also documentation professionals, librarians, as well as retirees.
However, the platform wishes to attract more amateurs and diversify the accessible documents in order to interest other audiences.
Archives on the Second World War will thus be available for transcription within a few months.
In the meantime, for the curious who would like to start this summer, the coordinator of the platform advises beginners to dive into the transcription of a few pages from the
notebooks of archaeologist Raymond Mauny
.
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► Three questions for historian Anaïs Wion
Researcher at CNRS and researcher at IMAF, specialist in Ethiopia from the 15th to the 18th centuries, Anaïs Wion co-directs the last project posted on the platform, that of the transcription of the notebooks of the geographer and linguist Antoine d 'Abbadie.
RFI: Why were you interested in these notebooks?
Anaïs Wion:
The notebooks of Antoine d'Abbadie, who traveled the Horn of Africa between 1837 and 1848, are a kind of fantasy for all researchers working on Ethiopia!
They are full of linguistic, historical and geographical descriptions taken during his trip.
There is no equivalent of such important, precise and ancient data on this region before these notebooks.
But so far they have been very little exploited.
These are small notebooks and digitization makes them much more readable.
How do you work on the transcription of these notebooks?
Doing collaborative transcription is a real challenge, because Antoine d'Abbadie's writing is very tight and the notes are taken in several languages: in French, in Somali, in Afar, in Arabic, in Amharic ... more, Antoine d'Abbadie often invented symbols to transcribe the pronunciation of names. And then these notebooks are extremely precise: they are full of proper names of places, of people met ... To translate a single page, you need at least an hour. For someone who does not know Ethiopia at all, this is not easy. It is better to start with your translation books! A retired gentleman single-handedly transcribed two notebooks from Antoine Abbadie. A laboratory research assistant also worked every day for a year to advance the transcription.
What are the objectives of this project?
This project will allow researchers to be able to work on these notebooks, which have not been widely used for the moment, and to create a small community of people interested in Antoine d'Abbadie and in the region.
We would also very much like to present these notebooks and organize collaborative transcription workshops in Ethiopia when the health and political situation permits.
And in the long term, we plan to publish these notebooks, to make them accessible to as many people as possible.
► Platform chronology:
2011:
The Institute of African Worlds (IMAF) begins a first experience of valuing archives on a
blog
(research notebook) with the notebooks of Raymond Mauny
2016:
Birth of Transcrire.
1st version of the collaborative transcription platform, produced thanks to the Consortium Archives des ethnologues (https://ethnologia.hypotheses.org/) of the
TGIR Huma-Num
.
2021:
redesign and 2nd version of Transcrire, thanks to funding from the CollEx-Persée network.
► Collaborative transcription workshops:
Several meetings are planned in France at the start of the 2021 school year to transcribe with others and share around the practice:
-
The epics of the Condorcet campus
: Thursday September 30, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. and Friday October 1, 2 p.m.-4 p.m.
- At the end of the year, new
transcription at the National Library of France in Paris (BnF)
, on the Abbadie notebooks.
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